The Reason We Notebook

When I was in school, I hated worksheets. Hated them. It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy learning, or that I had a terrible work habit. No, I just found them mind-numbingly boring, repetitious and lacking in creativity. I can remember — at the age of 7 — telling my mom, “These are busy-work. There is no other function for these. I should be reading a book!” (I’ve always been opinionated.)

When we decided to homeschool, I knew I wanted to avoid worksheets. After all, why subject my kids to something I resented so much? But… writing about a subject increases retention. It helps us think through what we’ve read and process our thoughts. That’s one of the reasons I included a notebooking section in Bible Road Trip.

I decided we would try keeping notebooks on each subject. There were no mindless fill-in-the-blank spaces, and there was plenty of room for sketching, note-taking, brainstorming, and dreaming. Blank notebooks created some tension for the boys, and I found that lined pages formatted for their age level were helpful.

At first, I would read aloud for a few paragraphs, then stop and help the boys decipher what information was important enough to write about. As they’ve aged, the boys have learned to keep their own notebooks without much input from me on what to record. One thing they still enjoy is having structured pages. That’s why I created the Notebooking Journals to go along with the curriculum. By high school, I expect they’ll be using their own creative notebooks that they structure themselves.

Other People Who’ve Notebooked ~ Maybe You’ve Heard of Them?

There are a lot of fads in education. However, notebooking has existed for a long time and been used by many successful, creative adults. There are dozens and dozens of famous “notebookers”, but I picked just a few for your consideration:

(Illustration: Anatomy of the Neck, Da Vinci, Public Domain)

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519)

Da Vinci was a incredible artist, mathematician, scientist, and writer. He is perhaps best known for his painting The Last Supper, as well as his journal entry displaying The Vitruvian Man. Da Vinci’s notebooks are full of findings in the fields of anatomy, optics, engineering, and hydrodynamics. In fact, he diagrammed machines akin to modern-day items such as: helicopters, airplanes, an adding machine, and a tank.

Beatrix Potter (1866-1943)

Potter is famous for her wonderful children’s books, like The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Her notebooking began early in life with watercolor sketches of animals and drawings of nature and archeological finds. Because she explored the reproduction of fungal spores through illustrations and research, Potter was know not just as an author and illustrator, but as a natural scientist as well.

Thomas Alva Edison(1847-1931)

Edison invented so many items (with 1,093 patents), that it’s difficult to chose just a few. However, among his best known inventions are the incandescent light bulb, the phonograph, and the motion picture camera. An inventor’s notebook can be vital not only to keep track of thoughts and ideas, and failed or successful processes, but also to create a establish a patent claim. (Pages should be dated and signed by a witness.)

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) was a writer. His books, including Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, have been translated into more than 170 languages.

(Illustration: Notes for Chapter 5 of The Brothers Karamozov, Public Domain)

Other notebookers you may recognize:

Ludwig van Beethoven

Thomas Jefferson

Nikola Tesla

John Adams

John Quincy Adams

Louisa May Alcott

Lewis Carroll

Madeline L’Engle

Notebooking is a great way for children to learn! Not only that, it’s an important creative tool that will serve them a lifetime once they learn the discipline.

Find Out More About Notebooking!

Take a look at the notebooking we’ve done over the years, and find out how it’s impacted critical thinking and writing skills for our boys.

Illustration: Codex Flight of the Birds, Leonardo DaVinci, Public Domain

Notebooking isn’t like the somewhat stilted practice of filling out workbook sheets, but neither is notebooking a finished process. When notebooking, students are creating an enduring record of their process and what they’ve learned, but the record isn’t complete.

Starting out with notebooking, we found it really helpful to use fun, engaging pages with lots of room for drawings and interesting-looking writing spaces. The writing lines were also a big help, as our kids were still really learning how to form letters and sentences. To begin, we all sat around the table, the boys with their notebooks and colored pencils…

Notebooking Resources You Want to Know About!

Thinking Kids Press has been partnering with NotebookingPages.com for several years now. We love them!

NotebookingPages.com has some amazing resources available to help your children notebook in your homeschool or for fun. They have many notebooking sets covering a variety of subjects available for free download for their newsletter subscribers, as well as some exciting opportunities on a periodic basis.

The benefits for their lifetime members are fantastic. NotebookingPages.com lifetime members have access to a number of fabulous benefits:

Access to over $1000 of notebooking sets covering subjects including: the alphabet, character study, copywork, famous people, geography, history and timelines, Latin and Greek (word studies), science, nature, and basic lined pages for writing and drawing.

Access to all future notebooking sets. The site is constantly being added to.

12 months FREE access to NotebookingPages.com’s exclusive notebooking and copywork web-application. The Notebooking Publisher™ is a web-based application designed to enable parents and students to customize and create their own notebooking (& copywork) pages.

These extensive journals are designed to accompany the three year Bible Road Trip survey curriculum. The notebooking journals are available for grades 1-3 (Lower Grammar), grades 4-6 (Upper Grammar), and grades 7-9 (Dialectic). For the Preschool/Kindergarten level and the 10-12 grade (Rhetoric) level, there are no journals. Upper high school students keep their own journals and have a separate creation project. However, they can use the Dialectic journals effectively.

Cobblestone Path is a new Church History notebooking / research program for middle school and high school students. The journals are structured to allow students to have a guided research and learning experience, yet still allow for freedom and creativity in the notetaking and sketching process. The first of eight journals is available now, with new journals planned for release every month or two.

We love the Apologia Exploring Creation elementary science series, and we especially loved the notebooking journals. Really, it’s Apologia’s fault that we notebook. We’re starting our third year of the upper level Apologia classes–last year we used Physical Science Student Notebook. The Apologia notebooking journals are fabulous.

Welcome to Thinking Kids!

My name is Danika Cooley, and I’m glad you’re here. This site exists to help equip you to teach your kids the Bible and Christian history. I’m an author, a homeschool mom, and a curriculum developer. Pull up a chair and stay awhile.